Near death, but no UFOs

Huzzahs to Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown for the audacious Oct. 15 cover story, “Heaven Is Real.” The magazine’s circulation and revenues may be locked in a mortal tailspin, but Brown’s instincts for zigging where others zag are resilient. That lack of predictability has been a career trademark at venues like Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Talk magazine, and The Daily Beast. And here we are again.

Last week’s cover excerpted a book by Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, who emerged from a week-long coma in 2008 with an afterlife story that would appear to violate the tolerance threshold of the standard U.S. weekly news magazine. For instance:

“A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above,” Alexander writes, “and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had come to make this noise — that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.”

Critics are clobbering him for it, naturally, but Alexander eschewed the professional risks in order to tell Newsweek readers what he says made this near-death experience unique: “As far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.”

That’s interesting. But how to corroborate the interior experience? De Void readers already know (precognition) where this is headed.

Newsweek illustrated the “Heaven” article with three previous God-and-the-hereafter cover themes, and referred to its “numerous covers about religion, God, and that search.” Which is fine, except the archives for UFO data are orders of magnitude larger than for evidence of Alexander’s NDE. And yet, for all of its aspirations for going off the MSM rez and becoming an industry iconoclast, Tina Brown’s dying weekly has so far been incapable of applying any journalistic standards to The Great Taboo.

Seriously, how choosy can she be at this point? Over the summer, Brown felt compelled to counter a rumor of Newsweek’s allegedly imminent dissolution into the digital-only realm with a memo accusing critics of “scaremongering.” But last month, writing for USA Today and citing Newsweek’s “desperate and operatic struggle” for solvency, columnist Michael Wolff accused Brown of “being blind to the realities of the new [digital] world” and wagering on “old-media tricks” to sustain “the kind of zeitgeist-shaping, buzz-creating, cocktail-party-fueling package that the media has, for so long, been built around — part craft, part culture, part snobbery.”

Memo to Tina Brown: If the ship’s going down, make the obituary-writers eat that “snobbery” part and assign some resources to a topic that not a single one of those glib carrion birds has the stones to touch. Read UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry (Swords/Powell) and UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record (Kean). Surprise the entire Fourth Estate with honest journalism on The Great Taboo. Give ’em something to really hate.